"Dominoes & Other Stories from the Puerto Rican, " the long-awaited debut collection of fiction of playwright and poet Jack Agueros, is a unique window on the untold stories of the lives of Puerto-Rican Americans.

With a phenomenal richness of detail, Jack Agueros brings the reality of Puerto Rican experience in New York fully to life. In stories that span the decades of the 1940s through 1990s he recreates the barrio in all its multi-faceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, numbers collectors, tropical fruit vendors and sidewalk games of dominoes, its knife fights and junkies' raps and its succesful stories of craftsmen and entrepeneurs.

These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet experiences, but throughout, Jack Agueros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion that gloriously affirm quiet moments of grace and triumph in common and ordinary struggles--the real stuff of literature.